Darwin's room at Christ's College Cambridge

John van Wyhe takes us on a tour of Darwin's student quarters at Christ's College. He describes college life when Charles Darwin was a student and debunks some of the myths that have arisen around Darwin's life. And Rob Morrison reads a verse from his own poem, celebrating the life and achievements of Charles Darwin.

Transcript

John van Wyhe: We're in one of the student rooms of Christ's College. This particular room was Charles Darwin's room which he moved into in 1828. His son came to Christ's in 1858 and Darwin wrote him a letter saying, 'Ah yes, you're above the room where my cousin was, but I was in First Court in the middle staircase, up the stairs, door on the right, and capital rooms they were.'

Robyn Williams: 'Capital rooms'. Well, I'm surprised at the sheer size of this main room.

John van Wyhe: Yes, to be a student in Darwin's day is not like it is now. They were very wealthy. This room cost 15 pounds per year, and he had a college servant called a gyp who brought him his breakfast and set the table and cleared his things and took care of his clothing, complete with nice furnishings and nice prints on the walls. He was a very well-to-do young man.

Robyn Williams: How similar is it now with its wonderful panelling and its colours to what it was like way back then?

John van Wyhe: The room now hasn't yet been restored. We're restoring it for next year to open to the public. So it doesn't look much like it did, although the fabric of the room is all still here. Right now you have this rather attractive bare oak panelling, but in Darwin's day that was deeply unfashionable. They didn't have this kind of bare panelling, it was all painted. And we've had professional paint analysis done, so we know that it was a pale chalky white with a slight bluish tint, and this matched some of the fabric that we found in the seat cushions in the bay windows. And he would have had curtains of a matching pattern, and he would have had a large wool carpet in the centre of the room; we've having one remade from a period design to put back in here. So it would have been a very comfortable, somewhat luxurious room by our standards.

Robyn Williams: Yes, tell me about the cushions...over there there are two bay windows and they're looking out onto the quad, a wonderful serene quad. You wouldn't imagine that a bank and Marks and Spencers are just there across the wall. But when you sat down on the cushions, how much was preserved of the original stuff that Darwin had all those years ago?

John van Wyhe: Well, up until six months ago they were just some synthetic seat cushion covers there which you could unzip on the back, and now that we're trying to restore things these were actually properly looked into. And underneath the outer layer was another seat cushion from about the 1930s, and underneath that one was another from about the 1880s, and underneath that was another one from the 1830s, which is right for Darwin's day. And we think that they were actually still in this room because part of the colours of the fabric of the seat cushions match the paint we found on the woodwork on the bay side of the cushions, so we think they've actually been here all these years.

Robyn Williams: How amazing. I can see over there by the side of the great big fireplace there's a little cupboard and you've chipped away the paint and you can actually see bits of blue there from the original.

John van Wyhe: Yes, nowadays we think of these old environments with their waxed oak panelling as what it looked like back then, but in fact it would have been colourful to an extent that it's hard to image for us. Darwin of course as a student was not a Victorian, this was before Victorian times, this was Regency England not Victorian England, so there's a major difference. So when we're restoring the room we're trying to be sensitive to the fact that this was a Regency student room.

Robyn Williams: He'd been to Edinburgh already, hadn't he? He'd been there to do some geology and he'd come here to theology. Is that right?

John van Wyhe: That is what's always said, that Darwin came to study theology at Cambridge, but it's not true. It's based on the fact that he didn't go through with studying medicine in Edinburgh and his family said why don't you become a clergyman, that's another respectable profession for the younger son of a wealthy English gentleman. In those days there wasn't a degree in theology or indeed in almost anything else. To become a clergyman it was a prerequisite to first get a BA from an English university in order to then enter the Church of England. So he had to get a BA, which he did. Then he would have had to undertake a study in divinity, which he never did because the voyage of The Beagle came along.

Robyn Williams: I see, so he was actually doing a general BA...in what?

John van Wyhe: Well, it was just a bachelor of arts. He studied the classics, Euclid and William Paley.

Robyn Williams: William Paley...was he actually in this room as well, the blind watchmaker fellow?

John van Wyhe: There is a rumour, a legend, that Paley was in the same room, but there is no evidence in the college itself that can prove that Paley was in this room. However, college legend used to say that Darwin was in this room, and we now know that was correct, so there might be something in it.

Robyn Williams: I see, and would that be an influence. Can we just go next door and have a look at the bedroom because through this doorway is a tiny place which is now a sort of bathroom and a bit of a library. Is this where he washed his hands and..?

John van Wyhe: Yes, this much smaller area was his private space. So in this little back corridor there would have been a bed where Darwin would have slept, and he had a dog. The dog may have slept on the bed with him. But back here would have been his dressing room, it was his private room. And the gyp would have come in in the morning at 6.30 to wake him, and he would have brought some hot water to wash his face and perhaps to shave. And then at 7.00 he had to be dressed and he had to go across the court to chapel until 8.00, then he would come back to his rooms and his gyp would serve him breakfast, which was bread and butter, that's all there was. You could have tea or coffee but you had to provide the tea or coffee.

Robyn Williams: A gyp is the college servant. They're called scouts in Oxford, gyps in Cambridge. And so he would have had a permanent one to himself?

John van Wyhe: It wasn't just Darwin's, no. All the rooms on this staircase shared the same gyp, so he would have gone from one to the other. And then after breakfast they would have had college tuition or instruction from the tutor for a couple of hours, and then they had free time until they had dinner at about four o'clock in the college hall, that was a required meal. But all they got there was a joint of meat and a glass of beer, that's all that you were presented with, unless you wanted to have something extra like vegetables or bread. And in the college accounts, which have recently been rediscovered which show Darwin's college bills, there's actually a column just for vegetables, and that's why, because it wasn't part of your commons allowance. So if you wanted vegetables...we now know how much Darwin spent on vegetables in every week of his time as a student.

Robyn Williams: So what have these rooms been for up to recent years?

John van Wyhe: In 1909 when we celebrated the centenary of Darwin's birth the rooms were opened to the public, and there's a historic photograph of how they dressed them up. Since then it's been a fellows room. So until about the 1950s a fellow may have still lived here and slept in this room. Since then it's just been used for teaching. So it still belongs to a fellow today, but it's only occasionally used for supervisions.

Robyn Williams: I see, so students come in and tutoring is done and...

John van Wyhe: Yes, they sit around the table and their essays are read and they're given personalised instruction in the unique Cambridge way, but they have the privilege of being in Charles Darwin's rooms.

Robyn Williams: Let's go back into the main room because here between the windows and the lovely creaky floorboards...by the way, are they the same floorboards or have they been replaced?

John van Wyhe: That we don't know. We do know from a letter that Darwin came back one day and said 'everything's in a mess, they've been taking up the floorboards in my room'. But we don't know if it was these or some other boards.

Robyn Williams: Between the windows is the profile of the man looking, I suppose, middle aged. It's not that ancient profile that you have as if he was never young, but there you've got signs of that small mouth and that big brow, and somehow a very sweet face.

John van Wyhe: Yes, this is a Wedgwood plaque which was made by Thomas Woolner. It didn't used to be known...it's still not known exactly what the date of this piece is, but if you look very closely underneath the frame there's a tiny white label that says that it was set there by Professor GH Darwin in 1885, that's Darwin's son George.

Robyn Williams: Right. And of course Wedgwood...part of the family.

John van Wyhe: Indeed, that's why I'm sure they were pleased to make this because he was the son of Susannah Wedgwood, the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood the famous potter. Unfortunately there's a mistake. There's a second piece of pottery underneath which says 'Charles Robert Darwin 1829 to 1931'; Darwin was in this room from '28 to '31. So they got the date slightly wrong.

Robyn Williams: Slightly wrong, never mind, but that's up there...and some of the decorations look up towards the ceiling. The frieze is wonderfully...lots of twirls and red and greens. It's rather nice, isn't it.

John van Wyhe: Yes. Until recently it was not known that this panelling was all painted with a sort of dark brown paint, which was only removed in the 1930s. And that's when they discovered that the frieze at the top of the panelling was coloured underneath. The panelling is 16th century oak panelling. The piece around the chimney, because it's asymmetrical, was built in place.

Robyn Williams: Isn't that interesting. How would you compare, for instance, Down House, where he lived in Kent, as a record vis-à-vis his time at Christ's as a young man, telling us different things? Obviously the record at Down House is substantial because he was there for so long...never going abroad, funnily enough. Having travelled around the world in The Beagle he just never left the country after that. How would you compare the two places?

John van Wyhe: I would say there's actually a remarkable consistency between the two because this beautiful spacious room is a gentleman's space, this is a space for the gentry where he was served by a servant, and this is a completely unquestioned form of social difference. Darwin would have never blinked at the idea that there are people who are servants and there are people who are gentlemen, that's just the world he inhabited. That is as true here at Christ's College as it was at his home in Down with the usual Victorian servants' quarters, servants' payments et cetera. So there's a whole social world happening at Down House with Darwin at the pinnacle, but he doesn't have to attend to it all because there's all these people busily doing their jobs around him, all of that enabling him to sit at the table at his chair and to think and to read and to study and to write.

Robyn Williams: You're spending all your time on the Darwin project, and so far we've been through a number of different examples where the legend is rather different from the reality. How much are you seeing of the real story as being different from what people assume?

John van Wyhe: I see it happening with astonishing regularity. It's really amazing how often you hear a story about Darwin or you grow up with one, you read about one...when you come to search for them in the original materials, the original documents, sometimes they're not there. That can be very disturbing but it happens again and again.

Robyn Williams: Give me some of the most striking howlers, if you like.

John van Wyhe: Well, probably one of the most striking howlers is the story that Darwin took back his theory of evolution on his deathbed, or that he converted to Christianity on this deathbed. He was an agnostic in his latter years. These are completely untrue, but they circulate very widely to this day. Nothing seems able to eradicate them. Another one is that what Darwin was really trying to do was oppose the Bible or religion. That's just nonsense. Darwin was a passionate naturalist. He wanted to understand how natural things worked.

Robyn Williams: And Emma of course was a believer and he didn't want to offend her.

John van Wyhe: Well, that's another one. That's one we constantly hear, but actually if you go back and try and find the evidence for that, there isn't any. We don't have any evidence that Darwin did anything differently because of Emma. He always published what he intended to publish. We know from a few scattered letters that Emma was unhappy with a couple of his views, but they were views that he published. So as far as we can say from the evidence, Darwin held nothing back.

I think because Emma was religious and Darwin was an agnostic and many of his views flatly contradicted various traditional interpretations of the Bible, they probably didn't talk about some of these things, it was a bit uncomfortable. But her main priority was to support Darwin. She backed him up. Her loyalty was to Darwin, and yes he had some radical ideas, but this was all in the context of the comfortable country gentlemen with his radical ideas, but that was all right.

Robyn Williams: And what about the procrastination legend that he buried himself in barnacles and latterly with the earthworms. Of course the earthworms came I think towards the end more...but doing this meticulous work so that he could avoid doing Origin of Species until prompted by this missile, this Exocet that came from the other side of the Earth, Alfred Wallace's letter, which I think turned up something like 150 years ago last July.

John van Wyhe: Their joint paper was read this July, yes. So in fact 150 years ago right now the theory of evolution by natural selection was first published in the form of their joint papers. But no, it's unfortunately another myth about Darwin being afraid to publish or that he kept it a secret for all these years. These are fantastic stories and they used to be my favourite bit of the Darwin story, that Darwin knew the truth for 20 years but he didn't tell anyone. In fact that's not true. If you go back and look just at the biographies of Darwin since he died in 1882, no one ever believed or claimed that that happened, that his life was one of procrastination or delay or avoidance, until about the 1950s.

So all the people who actually knew Darwin...and Darwin himself when they told the story of his life, when they told the story of how the Origin of Species came to be written, they told it in a completely different way, one that if you go back and check the sources very carefully is exactly spot on. He came up with his theory after The Beagle voyage, but he was already deeply embedded in a publishing project that took him ten years to publish all the things he found in The Beagle voyage. There were three volumes on geology, five volumes on zoology. There was his great book The Voyage of the Beagle, two editions of that, numerous very important scientific papers, and then at the end of that he had one little bit of material to publish which was a barnacle that he'd collected on The Beagle. And that barnacle expanded into this big barnacle project.

He'd always been a specialist in marine invertebrates, ever since his days as a student in Edinburgh. So it's not a surprise that Darwin should have specialised in that particular area. It had always been his area of expertise. That's why he didn't give those specimens to other experts to name like the others, he kept them back for himself. And so he finished all the other books, he was just going to do a couple of barnacle papers and then he would do the species theory. But alas, the project, as so often with people who do projects like that, it expanded and expanded and he ended up doing all known living and extinct barnacle species in four volumes.

So the whole thing, together with about two years he lost to ill heath, it was eight years gone. But by the end of it he was sick to death of barnacles, he couldn't stand them anymore, because it dragged on. Because you see the nature of the project was of an exhaustive list. He couldn't give up when he was sick of it, when he was three-quarters of the way through, because he's not finished with the list. So he had to get all the way to the end. And the very day he finished, he opened up his notes of species and worked fulltime on it. So then he's been working on that for a few years, he's about halfway through a very big book, probably would have been a three-volume book on species, and then Alfred Russel Wallace's letter arrived in the post and changed everything.

Robyn Williams: Before I ask you how you're going to celebrate, tell me what sort of picture do you get of the guy yourself now you're so enmeshed in all the material? He always struck me as such a nice man if you compare Newton who was a bit of a nasty man. Does Darwin strike you as a lovely guy?

John van Wyhe: Yes, absolutely. Darwin strikes me as a very good-humoured pleasant man with very keen passionate interests in scientific questions. So if you knew Darwin you would have known him to be someone who was very friendly, a twinkle in his eye, always had a good joke but was more interested in the bee on the windowsill than perhaps the political conversation over dinner.

Robyn Williams: And to celebrate, what's going to happen next year?

John van Wyhe: That's impossible to list. The number of things that are happening next year for the bicentenary of Darwin are absolutely colossal. There are exhibitions in virtually every museum in every city in the world, it's absolutely astonishing.

Robyn Williams: Yes, there's one in Canberra in December.

John van Wyhe: I know all the people who work on Darwin, including me, are doing a whole series of lectures and talks, and there's so many exhibitions and books. I'm publishing three books next year and everyone else who works on Darwin is publishing books next year. So I think it will take us until the next Darwin centenary to read all of them.

Robyn Williams: And the bronze here?

John van Wyhe: Christ's has commissioned a new bronze of Charles Darwin, which is very exciting. It's going to depict Darwin as a student as he was at Christ's College. He'll be seated on a bench and you'll be able to come and sit next to Darwin and have your picture taken. But there is another bronze which was made last time around in 1909, that was made in New York, and it's a copy of one that was made for the American Museum of Natural History, and an American delegation came to Christ's for the centenary celebrations and they brought this bust with them. It was made to give to Cambridge, but when they got here most of the exhibitions were happening here at Christ's College so they gave the bust to Christ's College, where it sits in a portico to this day.

Robyn Williams: I was with John van Wyhe, a fellow of Christ's College of Cambridge.

Robyn Williams: And the bicentenary celebrations are already underway, as you'll have heard last Saturday, at the Natural History Museum in Adelaide when Rob Morrison stood to present this poem about Charles Darwin and how lucky we are that he wasn't an Australian and off on a sickie.

Rob Morrison reads from his poem, Some Australian observations on the nature of Charles Darwin's prolonged illness

Financially, a student's life is tough.The cost of books and union fees and stuff Means students, as they study to get through,Must often take a part-time job or two.

The same proved true for Darwin, so that he Forsaking study, took a job at sea As Beagle's naturalist, in the employ Of Captain (and creationist!) Fitzroy.

Seasickness struck him almost straight away,And as they sailed it cursed him night and day Until he wondered whether he could bear The endless agony of mal de mer.

Then for a while Australia played the host To Beagle, as it sailed along our coast,And Darwin's journal makes us understand How pleased he was to get his feet on land.

As any proper Englishman would do,He took some walks and hunted kangaroo,But though we named a city after him He found Australian customs pretty grim.

In January, eighteen thirty six,Our budding populace and politics Were bound to seem a little bit uncouth To Darwin, born and bred a British youth.

But colonies like ours were far away From Britain, and historians today Remark upon the freedom distance brings,Which lets us cut our mother's apron strings.

Thus British customs, though they might have been Revered by those who served their British queen,Were fading here, where men of common sense Soon recognised the charm of indolence.

Thus was the great Australian sickie born To Aussies, who still contemplate with scorn,Bewilderment, suspicion and dismay A man who chooses work instead of play.

These days a sickie doesn't mean you're ill,Condemned to bed, the doctor or a pill.You "chuck a sickie" for the Melbourne Cup,To watch the test, or when the surf is up.

I don't imply all that was going down In eighteen thirty six in Sydney Town But, knowing how they lived, one can infer That goofing off had started to occur.

Historians hypothesise that we Can trace that to our convict ancestry,When felons in the chain gangs thought it good To chuck a sickie any way they could.

It's hard to know just what Australians thought Of Darwin, who was quite averse to sport.Disdaining games and gambling, he averred Collecting beetles was what he preferred.

And so he thought it sad that there should be Such appetite for inactivity Among Australians, who he thought were crude As well as venal, indolent and rude.

So back on Beagle, green around the gills And seasick, Darwin kept applying his skills.His thoughts were on his specimens and not Saying "Bugger this!" and falling in his cot.

We who inhabit the antipodes Are apt to scoff at Englishmen like these.A seasick Aussie naturally would know To chuck a sickie and retire below.

But Fitzroy saw a stronger man emerge,For though afflicted by the dreadful scourge Of sickness, Darwin never tried to shirk His obligation to perform his work.

Such is the British way; to "get a grip!"To show the world a "stiffened upper lip!"Two hundred years ago you'd never find A sickie chucked by Darwin and his kind!

By now he had accrued a massive store Of specimens and artefacts galore,Which would have been enough for some; instead Ideas began to form in Darwin's head.

Five years went past till Beagle had returned And Darwin started work on what he'd learned,But even then, although he was ashore,His illness seemed no better than before.

Historians have thought of many ways By which to diagnose his long malaise,And experts, citing symptoms, have defined Rare maladies of body or of mind.

Some think that in his travels Darwin might Have been infected by a parasite,While others take a very different tack And swear he was a hypochondriac.

Beset by such afflictions, Aussie men Would have secured a doctor's note by then,Have chucked a sickie, dropped their work and each Have packed his fishing gear and hit the beach.

But Darwin, steeled with British discipline,Would never have considered giving in.Ignoring illness time and time again He studied corals, earthworms, plants and men.

And Darwin's illness lasted twenty years;Not spent in bed, but thinking up ideas And arguments until at last he'd solved The way that plants and animals evolved.

Those two decades saw Darwin working out How natural selection came about,Until a letter came to him one day,Perturbing him with what it had to say.

For Alfred Russell Wallace, so it's said,While feverish and tossing in his bed,Despite being ill (and feeling really bad)Had reached the same conclusions Darwin had.

And Wallace, in the letter that he signed,Revealed, like Darwin, he was disinclined To chuck a sickie since he clearly knew,Though ill, he had important work to do.

For Wallace made it absolutely clear That he and Darwin shared the same idea;How Nature favoured organisms that Were best adapted to their habitat.

Pity Darwin; what was he to do?The world, which lacked one theory, now had two,But who had published first? In his distress He asked his colleagues to resolve the mess.

I'm sure that some of Darwin's friends enjoyed A brief malicious twinge of Schadenfreude,But still they rallied round to find a way To let both theories see the light of day.

They all agreed both papers were to be Read and debated simultaneously,And so they were, and Wallace did endorse The "Origin of Species" in due course.

But there's a moral that their actions raise For, while the two are worthy of our praise,They both would be forgotten now instead If either had been Aussie born and bred.

Such origins would certainly preclude Egregious shows of British fortitude;Beset by fever, illness, pain or rash They would have chucked a sickie in a flash,

And had they dropped their work while feeling crook We'd not be celebrating Darwin's book Or birthday, and it's pretty safe to say That both the men would be unknown today.

The moral's pretty clear; it's simply this,Next time you've been out late, or on the piss,A brief reflection on these blokes should show A sickie may not be the way to go.

So take an aspirin and don't complain,Just pull your finger out; forget the pain,Reflect on Darwin, think of Wallace, too;Imagine what the two of them would do.

Should bouts of Mondayitis come your way,Or thoughts of working fill you with dismay,Don't chuck a sickie and remain in bed;Consider what you might achieve instead.

For, just like Darwin, you may find you could Reject a sickie for the greater good,And you may then discover, as did he,Your name revered for all eternity.

Robyn Williams: Rob Morrison from Adelaide with a poem we shall hear in full, longer than Paradise Lost or Regained, next year as we celebrate Charles Darwin, 200 years of age, in February 2009.

Guests

John van Wyhe

Bye-Fellow Christ's College Cambridge Historian of Science University of Cambridge UK